Chapter 37

It’s that night I start answering the phone again. This is after I’m so horny I have to go downtown and hunt for something to steal. This isn’t so much for the cash as to get off. It’s okay. The caseworker says it’s okay. It’s a sexual release, she tells me. It’s perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you’ve had it, you throw it away.

It was the caseworker who got me started shoplifting in the first place. The caseworker called me a textbook example of kleptomania. She cited studies. My stealing, she said, was to prevent anybody from stealing my penis (Fenichel, 1945). Stealing was an impulse I couldn’t control (Goldman, 1991). I stole because off a mood disorder (McElroy et al., 1991). It didn’t matter what: shoes, masking tape, a tennis racket. The only trouble is now even stealing doesn’t give me the old feeling of wow. Maybe this is because I’ve met Fertility. Or maybe I’ve met Fertility because I’m getting bored with my sex life of crime. Lately, I’m not even shoplifting, not in the classic, formal sense. Instead of stealing merchandise, I’ll walk around downtown until I find a cash register receipt someone’s just dropped. You take the receipt into the store it’s from. You pretend to shop until you find an item on the receipt. You take the item around the store for a while, then you use the receipt to return the item for cash. Of course this works best in big stores. It works best with itemized receipts. Don’t use receipts that are old or dirty. Don’t use the same receipt twice. Try to vary the stores you scam. This is to real shoplifting what masturbation is to sex. And of course, stores know all about this scam. Other good scams include shopping with a big cup of soda you can drop small items into. Another way is to buy a cheap can of paint, then loosen the lid and drop something expensive inside. The metal of the can blocks the x-rays from the security system. This afternoon, instead of finding a receipt, I just walk around trying to figure out the next part of my plan to grab Fertility and make her my own. Have her. Throw her away, maybe. I have to take advantage of her terrible dreams. Our dancing together has to be a tool I can use. Fertility and I danced most of the afternoon. As the music changed, she taught me the basic Cha-Cha, the Cha-Cha crossover step, and the female under-arm Cha-Cha turn. She showed me the basic Fox-trot. She told me what she did for a living was terrible. It was worse than anything I could imagine. And when I asked, What? She laughed. Walking around downtown, I find a register receipt for a color television. This should feel like I’ve found a winning lottery ticket, but I put the receipt in a trash can. Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In the world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules. The Fox-trot is two slow steps and two fast. The Cha-Cha is two slow and three fast. The choreography, the discipline, isn’t up for debate. These are good old-fashioned rules. How to dance the Box Step isn’t going to change every week. To the caseworker, when we started together ten years ago I wasn’t a crook. Originally, I was an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She’d just got her degree and still had all her textbooks to prove it. Obsessive-compulsives, she told me, would either check on things or clean them (Rachman & Hodgson, 1980). According to her, I was the second kind. Really, I just liked to clean, but all my life I’ve been trained to obey. All I did was try and make her lousy diagnosis look right. The caseworker told me the symptoms, and I did my best to manifest them and then let her cure me. After being obsessive-compulsive, I was a posttraumatic stress disorder. Then I was an agoraphobic. I was a panic disorder. My feet are walking down the sidewalk in the one slow, two fast steps of a waltz. My head is counting one, two, three. Wherever you look among the pigeons there are big-ticket receipts all over the sidewalk. Walking around downtown, I pick up another receipt. This one’s good for a hundred seventy-three dollars cash. Then I throw it away. For about three months after I first met the caseworker, I was a dissociative identity disorder because I wouldn’t tell the caseworker about my childhood. Then I was a schizotypal personality disorder because I didn’t want to join her weekly therapy group. Then because she thought it would make a good case study, I had Koro Syndrome, where you’re convinced your penis is getting smaller and smaller and when it disappears, you’ll die (Fabian, 1991; Tseng etal., 1992). Then she switched me to have Dhat Syndrome, where you’re in crisis over the belief you’re losing all your sperm when you have wet dreams or take a leak (Chadda & Ahuja, 1990). This is based on an old Hindu belief that it takes forty drops of blood to create a drop of bone marrow and forty drops of marrow to create a drop of sperm (Akhtar, 1988). She said it was no wonder I was so tired all the time. Sperm makes me think of sex makes me think of punishment makes me think of death makes me think of Fertility Hollis. We did what the caseworker called Free Association. Every session we had, she diagnosed me with another problem she thought I might have, and she gave me a book so I could study the symptoms. By the next week, I had whatever the problem was down pat. One week, pyromaniac. One week, gender identity disorder. She told me I was an exhibitionist so the next week, I mooned her. She told me I was attention-deficient so I kept changing the subject. I was claustrophobic so we had to meet outside on the patio. Walking around downtown, my feet switch to the two slow, three fast, two slow steps of a Cha-Cha. In my head is the same ten songs we listened to all afternoon. I pass up another receipt, as legal tender as a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, and I Cha-Cha right past it. The book the caseworker gave me was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We called it the DSM for short. She gave me a lot of her old textbooks to read, and inside were color photographs of models getting paid to look happy by holding naked babies overhead or walking hand in hand on a beach at sunset. For pictures of misery, models were getting paid to needle illegal drugs into their arms or slump alone at a table with a drink. It got so the caseworker could throw the DSM on the floor and whatever page it fell open to, that was how I’d try to look for the week. We were happy enough this way. For a while. She felt she was making progress every week. I had a script to tell me how to act. It wasn’t boring, and she gave me too many fake problems for me to stress about anything real. Every Tuesday, the caseworker would give me her diagnosis, and that was my new assignment. Our first year together, there wasn’t enough free time for me to consider suicide. We did the Stanford-Binet to figure out how old my brain was. We did the Wechsler. We did the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory. The Beck Depression Inventory. The caseworker found out everything about me except for the truth. I just didn’t want to be fixed. Whatever my real problems might be, I didn’t want them cured. None of the little secrets inside me wanted to be found and explained away. By myths. By my childhood. By chemistry. My fear was, what would be left? So none of my real grudges and dreads ever came out into the light of day. I didn’t want to resolve any angst. I’d never talk about my dead family. Express my grief, she called it. Resolve it. Leave it behind. The caseworker cured me of a hundred syndromes, none of them real, and then declared me sane. She was so happy and proud. She sent me out into the light of day, cured. You are healed. Go forth. Walk. A miracle of modern psychology. Arise. Dr. Frankenstein and her monster. It was pretty heady stuff when you’re twenty-five years old. The only side effect is now I tend to steal. My intro to kleptomania felt too good to leave behind. Until tonight. Walking around downtown today, ten years later, I pick up another receipt. I throw it away. After ten years of stowing away my problems so the caseworker couldn’t monkey around with them, all I have to do is dance the Cha-Cha with some girl and even my chronic stealing is gone. My one real psychosis I denied the caseworker is cured by a stranger. That’s all we did was dance. Fertility talked about her brother and how the FBI had his phone tapped so every time she talked to him she could hear the click ... click ... click ... of a government tape recorder in the background. Even before Trevor killed himself, she knew he would. It was in her first dream of the future. Fertility and I danced some more. Then she had to leave. Then she promised, next week, next Wednesday, same time, same place, she’d be there. Tonight, streetlight to streetlight, I walk the Fox-trot. In my mind, I hear the waltz. The memory of Fertility Hollis is in my arms and resting against my chest. This is how I get home. Upstairs, the phone is already ringing off the hook. Maybe it’s schizoids, paranoids, pedophiles. Been there, I want to tell them. Done that. Maybe it’s Fertility Hollis wanting to talk about dancing with me today. Ready to give me her second impression of me. Maybe she’ll tell me in secret what’s so terrible she does to earn money. All the way from the elevator doors coming open, I run to answer the phone. Hello. The apartment door to the hallway is still open behind me. The fish needs to be fed. The curtains are still open, and it’s almost dark outside. Anyone could see in here. A man on the other end says, “May you be of complete service in your lifetime.” Without a thought I respond, Praise and glory to the Lord for this day through which we labor. He says, “May our efforts bring all those around us to Heaven.” I ask, Who is this? And he says, “May you die with all your work complete.” And he hangs up.